The invention relates to a machine-readable data structure encoding security information for use in authenticating electronic documents (sometimes referred to herein as electronic business documents or "EBD") and to methods for using the data structure.
Systems for handling electronic documents within a computer system must address the problems of creation, routing, tracking, and approval of such documents in contexts such as a wide-area network (WAN) environment across multiple desktops (i.e., multiple workstations on a network). It is known for business applications utilizing online electronic business documents to permit the "signature" of a document through the affixation of a special code indicating, e.g., approval or disapproval of specific matters set out in the document. Additional background information concerning some techniques that can be useful in generating and validating such signatures, such as public/private key encryption and the use of certificates of authority, are discussed in commonly assigned and co-pending application Ser. No. 589,925, "Delegation to Session Key," filed Sep. 28, 1990, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,224,163 which is incorporated herein by reference for background purposes.